Bert Dan - November 17, 1982

Being Taken by the Russians

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So naturally we all took off and we walked right into them. And the Russian soldiers when they saw us, they ran over and grabbed the gun and they tell that I'm one of the Nazis with some, you know, and I told them that I'm Jewish and so on and what took place. And they were handling us very rough, very, very rough and they wouldn't trust anybody. They--there's no way you can blame 'em, you know. And they searched us and they took everything--whatever little thing, whatever we had, if anybody had a good pair of shoes or something, they took it away. They took everything away from us. And then they told 'em that uh, they are going to take us down in...into the little village and they are turning us over to the Russian command, which they did. After they took everything away from us--they took us down and they turned us over to the Russian uh, commander. Through a very--corridor they took us over there and they started questioning us. We didn't--we were not able to talk to them. There were a couple of guys that came from somewhere--from Czechoslovakia they spoke a little bit of the language, but not enough, you know, to make them really understand. But they had more of an idea what it was all about. And uh, they threw us in to a--they took us for a--for about fifty miles from there, we had to walk with them. And always the same thing like with the Hungarians, you know, but it was a little different story already because that ??? you know, we are free, you know. And they threw us into a camp, and uh, there were at least a hundred thousand Hungarians, Germans, Jews. Everybody was thrown, thrown in there and surrounded by Russian soldiers with machine gun. And I thought, "My God, they couldn't figure it out what they want--what's going to happen."